Where the Apple Falls
by 0torno
Summary: Maeglin finds himself becoming more and more like his father.


Maeglin picks the lock on his father's sword case with only a little difficulty, lifting the lid of dark wood to reveal black velvet and the sword of the same color within, meteoric iron and elaborately formed pommel glinting darkly in the weak green light filtering through the cedars.

Anguirel is too heavy for him, really, despite the smith's strength in his young arms; but he holds it aloft, grasping tightly with both hands. The blade is nearly as tall as he is.

When he buckles the sword onto his belt, its tip drags in the packed earth of the courtyard. He wears the belt over one shoulder like a bandolier.

When his father has fallen, they ask what Maeglin would like them to do with the armor. The exquisitely crafted galvorn plate metal, carven deftly and with dogmatic care, has not yet been destroyed. They _can_, though, Turgon promises - sympathy in his eyes, and grief, and something quietly revenge-hungry - they can melt it down for unskilled apprentices to experiment with; twist and heat and beat it until it is thrown away, the dark, smooth alloy that had been painstakingly balanced by his father's hands turned to the useless, malformed lumps of scarred slag piled behind Gondolin's forges.

He pauses, breathes, heart and mind numb. He shakes his head.

It is a good piece of work, he tells himself, and it would be a waste to destroy it, sickening though the memory of the form it clothed might be.

He tells them to send it to his room, and there it stays, shrouded with shadow in the corner; gleaming tall and proud in the moonlight when he wakes in the nighttime with sweat on his brow.

He finds himself looking at her - stomach tight like he hasn't eaten for days, swallowing to try and return some moisture to his parched throat - looking at the golden hair cascading down her back, the elegant motions of her hand on the wineglass as she speaks; her lips. And he stares at her through eyes darkened with exhaustion and lips slightly parted, stares until his vision blurs with the thought of her body underneath his; the pulse fluttering under the smooth white skin of her neck, the delicate bones in her wrists where he holds her tightly; and the taste of her skin maddens him and he presses his mouth to hers and catches her lips though she tries to turn from him - and he presses down, her breasts touching his bare chest and mouth brushing his neck with sharp, pained breaths, and she is _his_ - his and no other's - and he is drunk and dizzy with desire, heart pounding -

She turns away, suspicion and fear in her eyes.

His braid is cut during the Nírnaeth, shorn raggedly by the swipe of an orc's scimitar, and upon returning to Gondolin he uses his knife to cut it midway between his jaw and shoulders. The silky dark strands fall partly in front of his face, and nothing - short of braiding it back, which he finds himself unwilling to do - will keep it from doing so.

He allows the hair to obscure his eyes.

Turgon shoots him a concerned look when he first sees the change, but does not comment. He has more important things to deal with - a city to run.

One morning he reaches for a dark blue tunic with silver embroidery, similar to the clothing he always dons to attend Turgon's court - but he hesitates. His fingers hover over it, waver - and grasp the garment beside it. He has never worn the dark tunic, has avoided even looking at it since he came here (but cannot find the will to part with it), and its supple black fabric still smells of the loom; Nan Elmoth cedar heavy with preserved freshness. The simple, sparse silver tracery is geometric - vastly contrasted to the traditionally Noldorin extravagance of the swirling designs found on clothing in the marketplaces of Gondolin.

He pulls it on, the thick cloth exquisitely heavy against his skin. The tunic goes high up his neck, closing over his throat with a small silver clasp.

He goes to the council dressed entirely in black, a slip of elegant darkness amid the gaudy fluttering of the lords of the court.

The night that Gondolin falls, he takes the suit of galvorn armor from its stand and puts it on. The mirror at the end of the hallway shines in the half-light of midsummer nighttime, reflecting; Maeglin looks for a moment into the glass.

And what he sees there frightens him. Maybe it is a little taller, a little leaner, a little straighter - but the darkly clad figure before him is arrogant and dangerous, consumed with desire and hunger and loss; his hair, shorn about his shoulders, falls over his face and masks the madly ravenous glimmer in his dark eyes. He serves only the broken fragmented impulses of his own twisted heart, loyal to no one - and he has never looked more like his father than he does in this moment.

He buckles Anguirel onto his belt and turns away from the looking glass, throat tight.

The final parallel comes when he falls, of course - thrown from the walls of the city that so enthralled him by one greater and brighter and luckier than himself.

In the end, Maeglin is his father. And the scream of agony that tears from his lips at the last as the air rips past him is born more of this knowledge than the darkness of his imminent death.


End file.
